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The adventure began, innocently enough, with a brochure in my faculty mailbox four decades ago. Edinboro State University was offering a Western Parkland Field Study for Earth Science teachers the next summer and I, and a few thousand of my colleagues across the Northeast, were being invited to apply.
Thanks to funding from the National Academy of Sciences, it was tuition-free. The NAS saw such post-graduate work as an opportunity to enhance the high school earth science classroom experience at a time when environmental education was still a high priority.
I applied and was accepted, along with two dozen other teachers from the Midwest and Northeast. Though 2023 marks the 40th anniversary of the five-week expedition, many of the memories remain vivid all these years later.
During two earlier cross-country trips, with an aunt in 1973 and on my bicycle in 1978, I came to realize firsthand that the United States is a remarkably diverse country in a host of different ways. I also came to understand that many Americans have missed out on experiencing (and therefore didn't always appreciate) its great variety of geography, climate, flora, fauna and people.
I met Jim Hodges, a teacher from Purcellville, Virginia, at our pre-field study workshop in the spring and we decided we'd travel together for the class. Jim was a few years older than me, but was a hiker and cyclist and owned a small Toyota truck we could use for the trip.
With our camping supplies and bicycles aboard, we met in Cumberland, Maryland, and began the long drive across the Midwest and Great Plains on July 13. As I noted in my class journal, I intended that even the journey to the western parks should be an educational experience, too.
In the days before I-68 was completed, we had to navigate the ups and downs of the dissected Appalachian Plateau through northern West Virginia and eastern Ohio. Westward, in stark contrast to the hilly plateau, I was again reminded of how flat the glacial plains of Ohio and Indiana could be.
The long drive across the Midwest's seemingly endless fields of corn, soybeans and wheat ultimately brought us to Limon, Colorado, on the western fringe of the Great Plains. While the Plains may look flat on a map of North America, the wind-blown landscape west of the Mississippi River is often hilly and gradually tilts upward toward the Rockies. Limon is almost a mile above sea level, nearly 5,000 feet higher than where we crossed the Mississippi River at Saint Louis.
The persistent wind of the western Plains was a bit foreign to a couple Appalachian Mountain boys, but the brilliant sunset in eastern Colorado made the perfect ending to a long day of driving. Peace and quiet had eluded us at the littered, noisy roadside rest in western Indiana the first night of the trip. But on this night, we watched a lone combine on the sun-drenched field, cutting a wheat field which stretched in every direction across the horizon.
Just a few miles to the west, we would see the Front Range of the Rockies for the first time the next morning.
Next time, our intrepid travelers will explore Boulder, Colorado and Rocky Mountain National Park.
John Frederick (www.johnjfrederick.com) writes about nature and the environment for the Mirror.